How to Sharpen a Router Plane | Paul Sellers

[Music] I want to talk to you about the hand router plane because there's a lot of confusion surrounding it and there's a lot of misinformation that might be unhelpful to you so I want to straighten this out for you so that you can use your router for the rest of your life knowing with confidence that you know how to set sharpen and use the plane the most important thing is the cutting line as it is with most hand tools so let me offer this so that you if I put my finger on this point that's a high point on the blade going across the long axis of the plane that means this is higher than this side that means something's out of parallel now it doesn't necessarily have to be parallel but you have to start with a datum point some some way so we start with the sole of the plane because that's what this blade has to register to the sole of the plane so this is the governor and this needs to be in relationship with it this point is higher than the heel that's engineered that way the reason is is that there has to be a relief on the back edge of the sole of the plane otherwise if it was level some people take a file or abrasive and flatten it with the sole get it dead parallel dead sharp and think it will cut it won't cut it can't cut because there's no relief so this was engineered into the plane so it's necessary we want to keep that and so we're going to take a look at how do we get this because because it's out of parallel to the sole of the plane then if we take too much off the bottom on one side or the other then it will be out of parallel in the cut if we take too much on one side of the bevel or the other we have the same problem so let's start out with the width showing how the plane is working in relation to the surface of the cut so I've withdrawn my blade I'm going to put this on the surface of a straight piece of wood if I put my plane on here and then it'll drop the blade into the surface just turning this adjuster until I get down to a depth until it's just kissing the surface it's almost there so what happens here what we really want with this plane is we want a perfectly parallel recess that we cut with the plane so when I place this on now because I've adjusted it down what I've got on one side is I've got fuzzy edges where the plane is cut but the blade is half an inch wide so this area the half inch from this line is not cutting at all if I go a little bit deeper it'll be more exaggerated let's see if I can do this a little bit too much this is so important to get this right and I think you'll see why let me move over a little bit here so now I've got one side so in other words it's sloping if I go parallel to that take these fuzzy bits off so I'm still lying parallel to the surface if I'm going parallel to this over here I end up with a step so all the way across when I'm making my recess I've got these steps it looks terrible and if I was doing a veneer in there it wouldn't sit right so I've got to get this right it's something I've got to work on so I'm going to first of all remove the blade the cutting iron like this and I'm going to look at this part the top bevel so this point is lower on the bevel which means it's been filed out of square or ground out of spur out of square or sharpened outer square this point is higher so I really have to take this side here down until it's fairly looking square across but of course as I said the underside because it's this not quite an L shape I have to work on that soon - so first of all I'm going to work on the top bevel I'm going to bring this vise in because it is meant for metalwork and it holds better what I'm gonna do is clamp the shoe a cutting iron in the vise like this get a good firm grip on it and you can overhang on the outside if you need to and I'm going to file down this side now the nice thing about this particular brand the Stanley I think under record is usually they are hardened steel but they're not so hard that you can't file them so I'm using a regular flat file and I'm gonna file on here let me just cut this leather out of the way so you can see so I'm going to take my file and file this top edge here and get down to the cutting edge and make this a good long bevel so we're working we're looking to get about thirty degrees 25 to 30 degrees on this and I just keep taking this down until I'm taking it down off the bevel a little bit so file let's take a look still out of square and it may be that the very cutting edge is harder than the file in which case you'd have to use something like this these are diamond paddles you could use a diamond hold on here to get this down and it will cut just about everything because diamonds are hard or you can use an abrasive like this just glued to a piece of wood and that will cut it too so the couple of options there the file is usually the quickest way to get that bevel down to where you need it we take a look in a minute and I think we're getting closer but we're not there quite yet so I am definitely looking at once I take the bird off I can see that I've got lower on this side and the bevel is looking more like where I want it I just need it straight now so I've got to do that so just patience perseverance file it down until you've got what you need you want square corners if you can get them they go right up until you've got the bevel even I would say I'm fairly close to that remember the burr might not show but I'm getting there the top of my bevel is looking nice and flat now I can start working on that I can start working on the underside that's where we're going to go next too many vise handles to choose from here this is something that I've never seen addressed anywhere this this on the side and top side of the cutting iron and drop this into the plane again this time we're going to work on the underside a little bit so get this located in the post here this is the post and make sure the blade is just above the surface so it's rockin here so I take this up like this now I don't know if that will cooked yet it probably will but if I take this now and still slightly off I'm still slightly out of parallel but I don't want to go too far because it mainly mean that I need to take some off the underside of the soul and I need some double no no I need some masking tape here what we're going to do is we're going to mask off the main part of the soul because we don't want to score that so make sure you've got no kinks in your tape like this this will keep it parallel to the surface of the blade parallel to the surface it's just really just to protect the soul now I'm going to go on here it doesn't really matter whether you go would define all the course but I think I probably would go with the fine make sure that the blade is up above the surface completely you don't want any contact with the surface to start with when you lock it off so I'm taking nothing off that leading edge on the underside turn it a quarter turn nothing now that felt like it was having contact with the surface nothing just keep going nope well I'm looking for his abundant light on the underside of the blade just a narrow bundle line I'm gonna take a pass now and I could feel that biting into the surface of the stone and there's a band of light on there that's about a millimeter wide on one side but zero on the other side so that means I want to go a little bit lower to get that band of light to where it hits that corner then I'll be able to determine exactly where I need to do a little bit more honing and shaping and so on so now I'm going to take just a little knotch deeper not much it looks like I'm turning that wheel a lot but I'm relying on the sole so I don't want to take too much I'm going to back off there because it was rocking too much so what I've got now I've hit the corner I'm right on the corner this side is much broader than I want it to be so I now balance this out between the underside of the blade and the top side I'm going to try and get that equal on both sides so that my blade will be parallel to the surface but remember it's not critical for this to be square across it's not critical what's critical is that the cutting edge is parallel to the sole of the plane that's the most critical element so aesthetically it would be nice if it was dead square if it's not what matters is whether it's cutting parallel so now I can work on the on the side of the blade and the top side if I need to I don't really need to take that off remove the blade and now I've got to do is I've got to flatten this salt so I'm going to keep this angle this pitch on the underside like that I'm going to put it onto my coarse stone here a little bit of fluid just to keep the plate clear and I'm just going to put my finger I want to press harder on one side than the other so I'm pressing harder on the right side and I keep it dead flat to the sole I'm not sure how much of this you're going to see but I'm pressing very hard on my right I'm keeping it down on the sole and really generally we don't have to do this very often so it is creeping up on the band of light it's reducing the width of that band keep it flat keep it flat don't be tempted to lift up on the leading edge it's going down it's going down very nicely and now that band of light is about half the distance it was so I'm going on the finest stone this is the medium stone six six to eight hundred grit and the band of light is almost disappeared but not quite I'm happy with what I've got I believe this is a decent cutting edge all already so I'm happy that I'm going to turn this around press from this side so it's a lot of finger strength in this so now I've got what I want I've got a narrow band of light just barely discernible but that will help guide me on the top bevel for this top surface for the top bevel I just usually just place something in the vise like this and it will almost always do exactly what I want so I put this in here then I bring in a puddle like this and I adjust the height in the vise until I've got the bevel I want so I'm coming up a little bit now I don't want to follow the exact bevel because what I'm working on now is the very cutting edge so this is a like a micro bevel on that leading edge so I keep adjusting until the puddle is slightly more steep than the bevel I'm cutting and I placed this here this leading edge of the the bevel flush with the corner and then I keep it in position and I just start to use the this is resting on the bench here and I just use this paddle now to put a micro bevel on my top edge and that's creating exactly what I want it's a little circular movement and there is my micro bevel so I can feel a slight burn on this on the side I'm going with a finer one now so this is about 1200 grit and with a router you don't have to go beyond that 1200 grit I look on the topside of course this is a braiding steel out on the top but it's also a braiding on the underside so I can feel a burn on this side I could just simply use the blade now without any problem because that burr will just break us so once I've polished that out I don't have to polish it with a bit with a strop but I can polish it with this drop if I want to so the berries on the underside just pull the sole keeping it dead flat against this this drop that's just abrasive compound on the surface and that pulls the bird off and I have a cutting edge now I can trail this cutting edge here and just pull that to polish out the back at the leading edge of the bevel that takes off any burr and it gives me a pristine edge so we can reload that into the plane now and just see how well we did see how we did a true test of course and it may be that I need to micro adjust even more it may be but now it looks the leading edge of the cutting edge is now running parallel to the long axis of the sole so so now I'm getting a parallel cut parallel to the surface which is exactly what you want this is what this plane is designed for it's for cutting the bottom of recesses I use it for surfacing my Tenon's for forming my Tenon's for me for perfecting taking those initial surface planing x' that give me that pristine curve and that's what you want this is a plane now you've initialized it you've got this surface the underside of the sole exactly where you want it all the sharpening from now on will be just on the bevel and that's up to you if you keep it parallel to the underside you'll be fine you won't have to do that again for a number of years just remember that this plane is an amazing tool and once you start using it you'll wonder how you lived without it [Music] you

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 66,520

Rating: 4.969378 out of 5

Keywords: sharpen a router plane, router plane, sharpen, paul sellers, hand tools, woodworking, DIY, workshop

Id: iXREj_lXFCE

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019